Welcome ! This blog is a space for critical conversation on the state of global crisis, democracy and transformation. It has a particular focus on post-apartheid South Africa and its multi-faceted crisis. The South African crisis is linked to the crisis of global capitalism. This blog will feature critical analysis, debates, crucial documents from grass roots movements and useful online resources as part of Defending Popular Democracy.

Since its December 2013 special national congress’ call
for trade union federation Cosatu to sever its ties with the ANC, the
decisions of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) have
received poor analysis. Most misrepresented has been the union’s resolution for
Numsa to lead in the establishment of a United Front.

Despite numerous statements that explained that the
envisaged front was a movement whose primary objective is to strengthen and
co-ordinate union and community struggles, commentators and analysts continued
to describe the United Front as “a party-in-the-making” for electoral contests
in 2016 and 2019.

Unfortunately, it is through these jaundiced eyes that
the same commentators have analysed the outcomes of the Preparatory Assembly
for the United Front that was held in December last year.

Now that the assembly reiterated the view that the United
Front was not an electoral political party but a movement that intends to
struggle for a “democratic and egalitarian society”, those fixated to the
position that the coalition was a party are characterising the whole initiative
as riddled with contradictions and united only by antagonism towards to the
ruling party.

Days after the assembly, more than one editorial opined
that the danger for the front “lies in the fact that the new movement continues
to define itself largely in terms of what it is not, rather than what it is”
and will therefore disappear into political oblivion like Bantu Holomisa’s
United Democratic Movement or the Congress of the People (Cope).

For anyone who was at the preparatory assembly nothing
could be further from the truth. While there were intense debates among the 348
delegates that represented 71 organisations, there was convergence on key areas
on the agenda. For an example, there was unanimity about building united front
whose vision is a democratic society “without huge inequalities; disparities;
poverty; legacies of colonialism and apartheid; corruption and unaccountable
government”.

There was also convergence on building solidarity;
collective needs and interests trumping profits and other elite interests;
protection of the environment; opposition to anti-poor and pro-rich economic
policies; extending democracy in both political and economic spheres; and
campaigns against corruption, failing service delivery, increasingly
unaccountable governance, police brutality, violence against women, children,
gay and lesbian people.

No single organisation or delegate disagreed with
principles such as feminism, accountability, transparency, anti-racism,
non-sexism, anti-xenophobic, non-sectarianism, opposition to oppression,
exploitation, tribalism and ethnicity.

As it is to be expected, with organisations and movement
that come from different backgrounds and that have varied experiences; areas of
disagreements are bound to emerge.

As the meeting in December was a preparatory gathering,
areas where there was no convergence were referred for democratic discussions
in provinces and within constituent organisations of the front. What those who
pooh-pooh the outcomes of the assembly miss is that in more than one way, small
steps were taken through discussions to build a different kind of politics to
the ones who have become accustomed to.

First, the assembly asserted the principles of democratic
plurality, diversity, political tolerance and respect for different views
within the front. Participants committed themselves to politics of mutual
listening and learning where participating organisations and individuals
influence each other.

The adopted resolutions warn against any know-all
pretences and reliance on trans-historical blueprints. Referring areas on which
different organisations did not see eye to eye on back to constituencies was
therefore no train smash.

The assembly agreed that the front must be a learning
space where organisations travel together, discover solutions jointly and
unlearn oppressive, undemocratic and sexist methods of organisation and
struggle.

The second way in which the united front hopes to
inculcate different politics is to call on all those who associate with the
coalition to acknowledge their own weaknesses and adopt politics of consistency
that call on all, to actively reflect on and address their own racism, sexism,
homophobia, xenophobia and privilege. The personal is political and there is no
room within the front for talking left and walking right.

Third, the organisations that were at the assembly
committed themselves to confidence-building struggles where they fight for
winnable demands while also democratically re-imagining and building their long-term
vision of an egalitarian society.

Although there are no guarantees of success, the United
Front hopes to build a mass movement in this country through galvanising the
tributaries of ongoing struggles into a torrent.

Those who define politics as a game within the purview of
parliamentarians, political parties or paid politicians will remain blind to
attempts by delegates at the meeting in December to put actions of ordinary
people to determine their destiny as the real politics.

Equally, for those who equate politics with contests that
we hold every five years, mass campaigns involving millions of people acting
directly through their movements will not easily fit into their narrow
political boxes.

They will fail to appreciate the steps that ordinary are
taking to reclaim mass politics and through their actions transform themselves
from being political subjects into being political agents.

Dinga Sikwebu is Numsa’s United Front co-ordinator
and member of its National Working Committee.

In a surprising departure
from the corporate controlled narrative on climate change, the New York Times (30/11/2014), during the
build up to the recent UN-COP20 climate summit in Lima, Peru, ran a front-page
story in which climate experts warn:

that it now may be impossible to
prevent the temperature of the planet’s atmosphere from rising by 3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit. According to a large body of scientific research, that is the
tipping point at which the world will be locked into a near-term future of
drought, food and water shortages, melting ice sheets, shrinking glaciers,
rising sea levels and widespread flooding — events that could harm the world’s
population and economy.

The surprising coverage by
the New York Timeswent on to suggest a rising rate of emissions
has left us with two future possibilities: an unpleasant world of climate crisis, chaos and disruption or
a world with a global deal that ensures the planet is habitable. Either way the
future we are facing is grim. However, for climate justice activists gathered
in the people’ s space and on the streets in Lima, two decades of failing to
reach a global deal required a different approach: a bold rejection of the
pro-market and false solutions of the UN COP process such as carbon trading,
the Clean Development Mechanism, finance solutions that fail to acknowledge the
climate debt of rich northern nations and the commodification of forest land
(through the infamous REDD+ scheme). At
the same time, activists have called for urgent action to advance
transformative alternatives for system change as part of the people-driven just
transition. The position of ‘no to false solutions but system change now’ has
to be explained to appreciate why this is the necessary way forward to secure
human and non-human life.

In 2000, Paul Crutzen, a
Nobel prize winning atmospheric chemist, introduced the term the ‘Anthropocene
Age’. Through this concept he has theorised an unprecendentedhuman effect on our planet’s life systems,
equal in force and impact to a great geological event. However, Crutzen’s
notion of the human as a geological force, in the Anthropocene, fails to
appreciate how power works in class-based capitalist societies. Put simply,
Crutzen has failed to appreciate it is not humans in general but capital that
is the real geological force destroying planetary life. Capital through its
organisation of production, distribution, consumption and social life, driven
by the need to make short term profits, has overshot planetary limits,
undermined natural cycles and threatens human beings with extinction in the
context of climate change. Capital in this context has become a geological
force capable of ending human and non-human life. It is wired into a systemic
logic of eco-cide and is incapable of solving the climate crisis.

Moreover, over the past
three decades of transnational techno-financial capitalism our world moves at a
dizzying speed. Social life, history and change have dramatically sped up. This
includes the super speeds of nano-technologies, fast food and hyper-mobile
globalised financial flows. At the heart of this is an addiction to growth,
premised on the assumption of unlimited accumulation. In this context
capitalist modernity, with its mastery of science and technology, has convinced
capital that it is the conqueror of nature as well as its master. As a master
it seeks to reduce nature to being a commodity, while ending an alternative
conception of nature: nature as a
commons. Thus, this commodifying illusion, informs the market based techno-fixes
of capital, like carbon trading, which operate with the idea of no limits to
capital.Yet the world is facing finite resources,
over-consumption by a few and widespread pollution of rivers, land, forests,
oceans and the biosphere. Hence with capital prevailing over the UN climate
process we are heading for the fast death of our future.

Finally, with the current
trajectory of an increasing rate of carbon emissions,carbon concentration (over 400 ppm) and a
rapidly heating planet, climate justice movements are thinking hard about
securing our common future. In this regard they seek to counter two possible
futures we face. First, in various Pentagon research reports, well documented
by Christian Parenti in his book Tropic of Chaos, the Pentagon envisages a
world of climate induced chaos. In this context, it seeks to use its awesome
military power to discipline such zones of chaos while protecting ‘life boat
America’. This is the ultimate fascist solution. Second, a view of our future
argued by Rebecca Sonlit in her book A
Paradise Built in Hell, recognises a pattern of human purpose and civic
virtue, coming to the fore in the context of disasters like the great San
Francisco earthquake and hurricane Katrina. Her book assumes the Manichean make
up of human nature, with its disposition for evil and good, but she documents a
pattern in which altruism and mutual aid manifests in the context of disasters.
While such a view celebrates the human spirit as a means to confront the
adversity of the future, and is generally a progressive response, it tends to
work with an implicit fatalism and comes short in terms of grappling with the
agency required for system change now.

Instead, and I would
argue, a system change perspective is grounded in appreciating that the pattern
of history informing our future derives from the 20th century.
Essentially, the 20th century was marked by a contest between two
sets of social forces, championing contrary principles: on one side social
forces championing ‘competition’, and on the other, social forces championing ‘solidarity’.
It is this pattern of struggle and its understanding of human nature, as
socially determined, that best equips us to confront and secure the future now.
It is this perspective that also enables us to champion system change
alternatives in the present.

An important example in
this regard is the rights of nature alternative. Its power as a transformative
alternative was demonstrated in Lima, through a sitting of the International Tribunal in Defence of the
Rights of Nature. The tribunal brought forth an incredible creativity by
activists to demonstrate the power of this alternative. Factual testimony,
rhetorical inventiveness, valorising culture and evoking lost histories became
crucial activist strategies before the tribunal to expose how capital is
destroying rain forests, ancestoral lands, water systems and communities, as it
scrambles for fossil fuels and minerals, through predatory extractivism.
Fracking in the United States, now standingat 800 000 gas and oil wells, stood out as the source of ‘fraccidents’
like earthquakes, pollution of water resources and a second wave ofgenocidal violence against native Americans.
Beyond testimony, activist voices also highlighted how the rights of nature
were an effective transformative discourse, providing a recourse to challenge
such destructive practices, if enshrined in national laws or sub-national
regulations. In seven states in the US, fracking is now banned. In short, the
rights of nature alternative places a limit on capital’s avaricious pillaging.

In addition to the rights
of nature, other alternatives such as food sovereignty, solidarity economy,
rights based carbon budgets, climate jobs, socially owned renewables,
affordable mass public transport are all adding up to a counter-paradigm to
capitalist modernity, redefining a relationship between humans and nature and
advancing a logic of systemic change. As part of the just transition such
alternatives seek a society based on solidarity to sustain all forms of life.
In South Africa the time for the just transition has arrived so we can all
survive climate change. As a response to the climate crisis it affords us an
opportunity to address the failings of South Africa’s transition to democracy: inequality, unemployment,
hunger, white privilege, ecological destruction and dispossession. It affords
us an opportunity to build a South Africa that belongs to all who live in it,
black and white, such that the wealthy pay the price for this achievement and
we realise Nelson Mandela’s dream.

While the ANC state has a
declaratory commitment to green growth, green jobs and even a notion of the ‘just
transition’ in the National Development Plan, this is merely empty policy speak
and an add-on to carbon markets, renewed extractivism (including fracking),
fossil fuel energy sources, nuclear, corporate controlled renewables, export-led
agriculture andde-industrialisation
oftransport and renewables
manufacturing. Essentially the ANC state has surrendered to market centred green
neoliberalismand the logic of eco-cide.
Hence it has shown itself incapable of leading a deep and transformative just
transition. Instead, such a transition has to be led from below by forces like
the NUMSA-led United Front, the emerging Food Sovereignty Alliance, the
Solidarity Economy Movement, community-mining networks and rural movements.
Such forces need to champion a ‘Peoples CODESA’ on the climate crisis and the
just transition, before it is to late.

Author: Dr. Vishwas Satgar is a Wits University academic and an
activist.This article draws on a talk
he was invited to give at a parallel event to the UN-COP20 summit on ‘Systemic
Alternatives and Power’.

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About Me

Vishwas Satgar has been a grass roots activist in South Africa for more than 3 decades. He is currently engaged in supporting the Solidarity Economy Movement in township communities, supporting food sovereignty campaigning , climate jobs campaigning and defending popular democracy in South Africa. His academic interests include a focus on African political economy, Empire and Global crisis, Green Global political Economy and Transnational Alternatives.